The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) welcomed Vice President Kamala Harris’ plan to increase home construction, announced Friday during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, but the association also expressed some reservations about the proposal.
“NAHB commends Vice President Harris for making housing and homeownership a central part of her economic agenda,” NAHB Chairman Carl Harris said in a statement. “We are pleased that the foundation of her plan calls for building three million new housing units, because the most important way to address the nation’s housing crisis is to increase the nation’s housing supply.”
While the NAHB agreed with the plan’s ideas to provide a tax credit for entry-level housing construction and expand the tax credit for low-income households, “any tax incentive to support entry-level housing construction must be tailored to local market conditions and be widely available,” the statement said.
“Unfortunately, the plan makes no mention of reducing burdensome federal regulations that increase the cost burden of building single-family homes by 24% or the cost burden of building multifamily homes by nearly 41%. In addition, following President Biden’s rent cap proposal, NAHB is concerned that efforts to target institutional investors will harm the growing single-family rental market, particularly those built for the rental market, further discouraging housing construction that is otherwise desperately needed.”
